Nev­er­the­less, there is a way to go be­yond that bor­der to dis­har­mony. The ob­sta­cle, namely the lack of con­trol over the in­stru­ment, which the clas­si­cal com­pos­ers were faced with, can be over­come as soon as we rec­og­nize the in­ner world of the mu­si­cal sound-space – that is, to fathom our in­ner think­ing by means of our in­ner hear­ing, and to rec­re­ate the tran­scen­den­tal play of mu­sic from there.

Due to a great amount of sci­en­tific re­search and a re­cent im­prove­ment of our habits of hear­ing we know to­day that a tone is not just a tone. We know that, in the so-called tone, lies a hid­den world which had been ignored so far by con­ven­tional mu­sic and even by mu­sic the­ory. Fur­ther­more we know that, pro­ceed­ing from the mu­sic of the clas­si­cal and ro­man­tic pe­ri­ods, true pro­gress, so nec­es­sary to­day, is only pos­si­ble through the mas­tery over the mi­cro­cosm of mu­sic. This redis­cov­ery of the mi­cro­cosm of mu­sic is closely linked to the re­vival of mu­sic as such.

The fact that the third for ex­ample is to­day con­sid­ered “corny,” and in­deed stimu­lates sen­ti­men­talism in the masses, calls for fur­ther re­fine­ments which were so far im­pos­si­ble due to the de­fi­cient con­ven­tional train­ing of mu­si­cians. Such an ad­vance­ment through the mas­tery over the mu­si­cal mi­cro­cosm is fully in line with the con­cepts of the great clas­si­cal com­pos­ers and blends smoothly with their own mu­si­cal ac­com­plish­ments.

In the his­tori­cal de­vel­op­ment of the tech­nique of com­po­si­tion the oc­tave-par­al­lels were em­ployed first. At the time of the fifth, the smaller in­ter­val, the oc­tave par­al­lels were con­demned due to their “gross­ness.” The dis­pute among the ex­perts, con­cern­ing the oc­tave par­al­lels and the fifth par­al­lels, lasted for quite some time and was fi­nally set­tled in fa­vour of the fifth par­al­lels, which are finer dif­fer­en­ti­ated.

The fourth is that in­ter­val which com­ple­ments the fifth to be­come an oc­tave, and it can thus be re­garded as the re­verse of the fifth with re­spect to the oc­tave. There­fore, the fourth in its prac­ti­cal use may, and his­tori­cally has been, roughly equated with the fifth.

Dur­ing the era of the fifth and the fourth, the oc­tave and the third came un­der at­tack – the for­mer be­ing the past and the lat­ter the fu­ture in­ter­val. How­ever, once the mod­ern ad­vo­cates of com­po­si­tion had won the his­tori­cal victory in fa­vour of the third – cre­at­ing an in­flu­ence that reaches even into our time – the oc­tave and the fifth par­al­lels, then re­garded as gross, were banned from the com­po­si­tion les­sons at schools and acad­emies. To this day, we still find this pro­hi­bi­tion, even though any con­ven­tion­ally played in­stru­ment, sim­ply by its very na­ture, con­stantly pro­duces oc­tave and fifth par­al­lels, a fact that can be eas­ily proven with an oscilloscope.

There­fore, in to­day’s con­ven­tional com­po­si­tion les­sons mainly the third in­ter­val, and by the “most mod­ern” the sec­ond, is glo­ri­fied – and be­ing par­al­lels, they both will, in the fore­see­able fu­ture, most likely be ban­ished from com­po­si­tion les­sons, in much the same way we have wit­nessed in the past in the case of the oc­tave and the fifth par­al­lels.

The men­tal nar­row­ness of such an ex­tro­vert, unmu­si­cal con­sid­era­tion of the com­po­si­tional ele­ments seems al­most gro­tesque to an ob­server who knows the ac­tual spec­trum of over­tones – and be it only from the stand­point of physi­cal meas­ure­ments – and forces us all to read­just our think­ing if we are con­cerned with true mu­sic.

A dog is no more im­por­tant in crea­tion than a cat, and some­times the one or the other ani­mal ap­pears more prominently in the lively di­ver­sity of our world – at times they even may appear to­gether har­mo­ni­ously. Like­wise, the ele­ments of the mu­si­cal sound-space, the over­tones with their re­la­tions, the in­ter­vals, appear in the world of mu­sic in many dif­fer­ent ways, dis­play­ing vary­ing de­grees of re­la­tion­ship.

In the natu­ral spec­trum of over­tones all neighbours main­tain good re­la­tions. The pres­ence of stronger and weaker sounds in the natu­ral or­der of the over­tones is an in­di­ca­tion of a very natu­ral hi­er­ar­chy in which the stronger sound re­quires more space for it­self than the weaker sound.
When an in­stru­ment is be­ing played, the ba­sic tone there­fore is usu­ally very loud, and the over­tones, that are built succcessively upon the ba­sic tone, sound less and less while the space be­tween the in­di­vid­ual over­tones si­mul­ta­ne­ously be­comes in­creas­ingly nar­row.

Ex­peri­ence in mu­sic teaches us that sub­tler over­tones, lo­cated at a greater dis­tance from the ba­sic tone, are more di­rectly ap­peal­ing to our more subtle in­ner-hu­man as­pects than the grosser over­tones which are closer to the ba­sic tone. There­fore, the un­fold­ment of the more and more subtle spec­tra of over­tones not only pro­vides a greater com­plex­ity in the mu­si­cal or­der of the sound-space, but also lays the foun­da­tion for a com­pletely new sys­tem of in­fi­nite mu­si­cal di­ver­sity.

Only through the natu­ral, ar­tis­tic mas­tery over the subtle spec­trum of over­tones of a sound the very life of mu­sic is made ac­ces­si­ble – that se­cret power, that se­cret magic which con­sti­tutes true mu­sic.

To make the mi­cro­cosm of mu­sic au­di­ble – those subtle and ever more subtle spec­tra of over­tones and their ever more closely spaced tones – is the re­ward­ing timely task for the in­stru­men­talist of to­day.

To­nal­ity is the world of the so­cio­logi­cal stan­dards of mu­sic, and the melody, which moves in a to­nal­ity cre­ated of the natu­ral spec­trum of over­tones, re­mains, de­spite its di­ver­sity, within the stan­dards of that so­cial or­der of over­tones – the to­nal­ity.

In com­plete ap­pre­cia­tion of natu­ral, tonal re­la­tions the motif moves as the melody within the to­nal­ity, and within these great so­cial laws it es­tab­lishes, de­ter­mined by the har­mony, its natu­ral re­la­tion­ship with the other mo­tifs that take part in the mu­si­cal event.

Within a sound­ing so­cial frame­work which is ruled by the to­nal­ity, po­lyph­ony de­scribes, in terms of this un­der­stand­ing, the de­vel­op­ment of the vari­ous mo­tifs in the form of vari­ous melo­dies. More­over, in an in­te­grated world of many such so­cial struc­tures, po­lyph­ony forms the me­lo­di­ous de­scrip­tions of the de­vel­op­ment of many mo­tifs sharing a com­mon goal un­der very dif­fer­ent so­cial cir­cum­stances.

Natu­rally, this un­der­stand­ing of com­pos­ing re­quires a syn­the­sis of com­po­si­tion and in­stru­men­ta­tion – two spe­cial­ized fields which even to­day are still taught sepa­rately and there­fore behave al­most like steppar­ents to­wards mu­sic.